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Internationally, Out-of-School Time (OST) provision is widely seen as providing professionally-supervised activities through which young people, living in high-poverty contexts, can improve their after-school safety, as well as academic and personal development outcomes. However, even when practical barriers to access are removed, participation is typically low, with little known from young people's perspectives about why this is. To address this, findings are reported from a qualitative study with young people (aged 11-15) living in Hollyburgh, a high-poverty neighbourhood with wide-ranging OST provision. This explored young people's endogenous views about the neighbourhood assets currently available, and those they would ideally like to have, to support their pursuit of positive educational and wider outcomes. OST provision, both currently and ideally, emerged strongly as themes, with OST providers' responses to the young people's view also being sought. In general, the young people appeared unwilling to participate in Hollyburgh's current OST provision, associating this with the supervision of those involved in anti-social behaviours and with negative perceptions of their local area more generally -- views reinforced at least partially by OST providers. It is argued that to change such perceptions, OST provision must be explicitly understood as a contextualised activity, with the potential to create spaces in which young people and professionals can co-develop more positive -- and affectively just -- discourses about young people living in high poverty areas. This presents an important challenge to the OST field's current direction of travel towards implementation science and the identification of decontextualised, replicable, "high quality" provision.

Asset-based approaches to public service reform suggest a need for policymakers to shift attention from 'fixing' the perceived deficits of disadvantaged neighbourhoods, to recognising and building on the resources, or assets, they hold. However, these approaches have also been critiqued for interpreting assets so broadly that they effectively become meaningless, or so narrowly that they perpetuate deficit views. To counter these tendencies, a new conceptually and methodologically robust endogenous assets-mapping approach is proposed. This has been designed to enable nuanced insights into the assets young people living in disadvantaged neighbourhoods may draw upon to pursue positive educational and wider life outcomes. The approach's utility is illustrated through the case of Ayesha, a 14-year-old student with a difficult relationship with school. The paper concludes that an endogenous assets-mapping approach can help to generate more positive narratives for vulnerable learners living in disadvantaged neighbourhoods than schooling may typically enable.

Despite increasing pressure for policy and practice to adopt a more evidence-based approach, transferring evidence into use remains a stubborn challenge. This is largely due to a number of researcher-derived and user-derived barriers at play within institutions, organisations and systems that constrain active engagement with evidence. This paper contributes to current debates on evidence-use by suggesting that embedded evaluation approaches might overcome such barriers, through the creation of social capital that can be drawn upon by embedded evaluators to: (i) build trust, confidence and understanding around evaluation and evidence, on the part of local practitioners and policy makers; (ii) develop a co-productive evidence infrastructure that might draw together diverse stakeholders, as well as encourage user-engagement with varied forms of evaluation data (both numerical data and rich narrative accounts), to capture the richness of the unfolding story of complex educational initiatives. To illustrate this, this paper presents six reflective vignettes that ponder the barriers, and potential responses sought, within a two-year exploratory case study that aimed to actively engage local education-related stakeholders, leading a borough-wide place-based initiative, with evidence. Data reported within these vignettes were collected through a series of semi-structured interviews, supplemented by an embedded evaluator's field notes and analysed thematically. Although more research is needed, this paper concludes that the embedded evaluation model might have potential to respond to the diverse challenges associated with evidence-use, by positioning the evaluator in a relationally elastic way that might enable them to embed evidence-into-use pathways within policy and practice both actively and iteratively.

Background: Internationally, young people experiencing poverty and related disadvantages do least well in school. These inequalities tend to be concentrated in places with high levels of poverty and poor outcomes across multiple domains. Although place-based initiatives are sometimes used by policymakers as a vehicle to improve outcomes, such programmes often fail to engage meaningfully with local resources, further marginalising disadvantaged communities. Purpose: This article considers what asset-based approaches, which seek to understand existing resources (assets) in disadvantaged places, might bring to such situations. Focused on a disadvantaged inner-city neighbourhood in England, it explores professionals' and young people's understandings of assets through an assets-mapping approach. Method: During a two-year study, a university researcher was embedded in a secondary school, and 10 students (aged 13) were trained as co-researchers. Utilising visual mapping methods, they conducted 17 focus groups (45 minutes each) with around 225 of their peers in total. In addition, the researcher conducted 14 semistructured interviews with a group of local multi-agency professionals and with the co-researchers. Data were analysed thematically. Findings: The analysis indicated that professionals and young people understood the neighbourhood's assets in relation to perceived 'lived territories'. Professionals described different residential groups as 'owning' different geographical 'territories', identifying professionally-led institutions as assets that could transcend these. Conversely, young people talked about 'territories' primarily in terms of power and control: they identified self-defined social spaces, away from professional scrutiny, as among the neighbourhood's most valuable assets. Conclusion: Exploring the students' and professionals' contrasting positions through Giddens' notion of regionalisation, which distinguishes front spaces (i.e. professional and public-facing) and back spaces (i.e. private and personally developed), suggests that the tangible nature of assets is perhaps less important than the different power relationships at play within them. The study highlights the necessity of working in partnership with young people throughout the development of place-based initiatives.

There has been much discussion in educational policy on the apparent educational benefits for disadvantaged young people of engaging in schools' extra-curricular activities (ECAs). The evidence suggests strong associations between ECAs and improved educational attainments. Arguments made about the causal processes and underpinning associations tend to revolve around individualised notions of transfer, and in particular the suggestion that ECAs develop various 'non-cognitive' skills of transferable educational relevance. In reviewing key literatures, we argue that such a notion cannot be justified. Instead, our analytical contribution to the field suggests that learning and development generally, and the possibilities of school ECAs specifically, should be understood through the Deweyan notions of experience and temporality. Such notions suggest that the way young people experience ECAs and mainstream classrooms should not be viewed through the lens of transfer but instead be seen as part of a set of integrating experiences of life as event, that includes and yet goes beyond schooling, and that suggests young people's fullness of life as a unit of analysis. Our line of argument, therefore, suggests that the deployment of school ECAs as currently constituted cannot have generalisable predictive power in specifying causal outcomes for improved academic attainment.

By placing emphasis on equity and social mobility, the current UK education policy for England focuses on narrowing the educational attainment gap between more and less advantaged groups of young people--an approach that has strong parallels in many other Anglophone countries around the world. We argue that these policy and associated practice proscriptions tend to privilege an individualised narrative of agency for young people, teachers and schools more generally. Our paper argues that this individualised approach is highly problematic in that it decontextualises the complex and real agentic work of young people in schooling, making it difficult to empirically and theoretically account for differences in educational outcome between and within groups of young people. Informed by a social realist perspective, and in particular the work of Margaret Archer, we propose a theoretical model that we suggest provides greater explanatory and predictive power. The model focuses on the way ecologies of development emerge for young people. We suggest that such ecologies reflect different structural and cultural factors and processes, combining in ways that enable and/or constrain young people's educational reflexivity and agency and their ensuing educational engagement and attainments. We believe that building a typology of such ecologies of educational reflexivity and agency provides improved ways of developing equitable educational policies and practice--ones that relate clearly to the compositional mix of young people in schools and enable the development of interventions that better relate to such ecologies.

Internationally, Out-of-School Time (OST) provision is widely seen as providing professionally-supervised activities through which young people, living in high-poverty contexts, can improve their after-school safety, as well as academic and personal development outcomes. However, even when practical barriers to access are removed, participation is typically low, with little known from young people's perspectives about why this is. To address this, findings are reported from a qualitative study with young people (aged 11–15) living in Hollyburgh, a high-poverty neighbourhood with wide-ranging OST provision. This explored young people's endogenous views about the neighbourhood assets currently available, and those they would ideally like to have, to support their pursuit of positive educational and wider outcomes. OST provision, both currently and ideally, emerged strongly as themes, with OST providers' responses to the young people's view also being sought. In general, the young people appeared unwilling to participate in Hollyburgh's current OST provision, associating this with the supervision of those involved in anti-social behaviours and with negative perceptions of their local area more generally – views reinforced at least partially by OST providers. It is argued that to change such perceptions, OST provision must be explicitly understood as a contextualised activity, with the potential to create spaces in which young people and professionals can co-develop more positive – and affectively just – discourses about young people living in high poverty areas. This presents an important challenge to the OST field's current direction of travel towards implementation science and the identification of decontextualised, replicable, "high quality" provision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Asset-based approaches to public service reform suggest a need for policymakers to shift attention from 'fixing' the perceived deficits of disadvantaged neighbourhoods, to recognising and building on the resources, or assets, they hold. However, these approaches have also been critiqued for interpreting assets so broadly that they effectively become meaningless, or so narrowly that they perpetuate deficit views. To counter these tendencies, a new conceptually and methodologically robust endogenous assets-mapping approach is proposed. This has been designed to enable nuanced insights into the assets young people living in disadvantaged neighbourhoods may draw upon to pursue positive educational and wider life outcomes. The approach's utility is illustrated through the case of Ayesha, a 14-year-old student with a difficult relationship with school. The paper concludes that an endogenous assets-mapping approach can help to generate more positive narratives for vulnerable learners living in disadvantaged neighbourhoods than schooling may typically enable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been much discussion in educational policy on the apparent educational benefits for disadvantaged young people of engaging in schools' extra-curricular activities (ECAs). The evidence suggests strong associations between ECAs and improved educational attainments. Arguments made about the causal processes and underpinning associations tend to revolve around individualised notions of transfer, and in particular the suggestion that ECAs develop various 'non-cognitive' skills of transferable educational relevance. In reviewing key literatures, we argue that such a notion cannot be justified. Instead, our analytical contribution to the field suggests that learning and development generally, and the possibilities of school ECAs specifically, should be understood through the Deweyan notions of experience and temporality. Such notions suggest that the way young people experience ECAs and mainstream classrooms should not be viewed through the lens of transfer but instead be seen as part of a set of integrating experiences of life as event, that includes and yet goes beyond schooling, and that suggests young people's fullness of life as a unit of analysis. Our line of argument, therefore, suggests that the deployment of school ECAs as currently constituted cannot have generalisable predictive power in specifying causal outcomes for improved academic attainment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]